Enterprises across the industry segments are realizing how the digital evolution can help them remain relevant, differential, win and be the leader. A flavor and fragrance firm uses technology to find if the customer really likes a smell, a retailer uses beacon to track the movement of customers inside the store thus knowing their preferences and providing appropriate buying stimulus, utility firm uses IoT to smartly measure the use of its services and thereafter provide advice on the use of its services, healthcare providers use wearable and the existing data with them to create a persuasion engine for their customers. Air travel industry is using technology for online ticketing, surge pricing, in-flight entertainment and customer preference tracking. In every industry the impact of digital disruption is evident. Hardly any business process remains un-impacted.The demand thus created for the enterprise IT group is pretty unique. Digital disruption led by social, mobility, analytics, AI and IoT is leading to numerous smaller, short-term projects. It&rsquo;s a debatable proposition if business use cases are leading the technology or technology is creating new business use cases. The imperative to the enterprise architecture team is that they must be innovative and come out with differentiating, effective and efficient use cases that lead to higher value creation. Thus the enterprise and IT architecture team is continuously in pursuit of better, leading solutions. Imagine an entity that has not just cumulative knowledge of the architectural use cases for an industry, but also has understanding of the evolution of use cases based upon evolving technologies and is one which could provide enterprise and IT architecture services to the corporate enterprise and IT architecture team.Beyond the enterprise and IT architecture teams, let&rsquo;s consider the IT design, development and support teams. There is a severe challenge emerging there too. Most of the projects emerging from digital disruption need unique skills spanning across architecture, package, programming, QA and methodology. Large projects following waterfall methodology are becoming rare. In this environment, creating and nurturing a team for an enterprise becomes a difficult task. The need to re-skill rapidly becomes pretty important. The individuals and the enterprise, both may abhor it. An individual staff member may like to develop an extensive experience in a given technology while the enterprise may need the staff member to migrate to different technologies. This manifests as emotional disengagement, reduces efficiency and leads to attrition. Attrition has its well understood negative impact on not only service delivery but also product quality. Imagine an entity that can provide to an enterprise, a skilled workforce for a short-term or as long as needed, which delivers SLA based outcomes that meet or exceed the set quality norms. There is no long terms obligation to use the resources and in fact there is no resource in consideration. The only contract between the entity and the enterprise is the SLA and quality outcome. This would make the enterprise much more effective, broad-based, productive and client-centric.The entity we talked about both at the Architecture level and design, development and support level, is not surprisingly a Managed Service Provider(MSP). The managed service providers often implement shared services within to cater to the needs of multiple customers. An interesting way to look at the operations of a managed service provider would be to consider a service delivery comprising four layers.1. Pure technology layer e.g. Java, c++,.Net, testing2. Package layer e.g. SAP, Oracle, Calypso, Tsys3. Business process layer e.g. logistics and distribution, warehousing, retain banking, property insurance4. Enterprise and IT ArchitectsImagine a small group of experts at each layer. Let&rsquo;s call these groups as Service Building Blocks (SBB). Based upon the need of an enterprise, one or more SBB&rsquo;s get selected from each layer and get aligned for a specific work or project to flow through. Different enterprise needs will lead to unique selection of SBBs from different layers. It&rsquo;s also possible that an enterprise may not need services of SBB&rsquo;s from a given layer. For e.g. an enterprise may not need Architects if they have in-house capabilities or have used another MSP for the enterprise and IT architecture services.The real efficiency lies in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) implementing effective managed service delivery center. As these centers cater to multiple enterprises, the skill continuation and consistently improving depth can be assured. This would bring efficiency and effectiveness thus ensuring reusability, sustainability and predictability. For the enterprises the new digital business process is core, hence outsourcing the IT work or projects in managed services mode being non-core activity, will be prudent.Now that the need and benefits of using an MSP to effectively leverage the digital disruption is established, it would be important to delve deeper in the MSPs itself. Pertinent questions would be what are the characteristics of a good MSP, would it make sense to select one MSP for all needs or select different MSPs for different needs, how can cross MSP collaboration happen and what would always be good to keep as in-house expertise and never outsource to an MSP. These could be good topics to get covered in another article.

Digital Disruption Necessitates Managed Services 

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